Production of wire products is generally a multi-step process involving forming the wire from wire rods and the like, annealing the wire and forming the wire into the final product, such as by coating, stranding, etc. Wire rods are drawn to form the wire which is then wound onto bobbins for annealing. After annealing, the wire on the bobbins is unwound and used to form the final product.
After the annealing process the wire is soft; thus, wire unwound from the bobbins after annealing often has significant surface defects resulting from the unwinding. Typically, wire takes a second pass through the drawing machine after being unwound from the bobbin to remove surface defects and re-shape the wire. Since the drawing machine must be capable of significantly reducing the size of a metal rod (e.g. down to the size of wire), the drawing machine is a large, high power, capital intensive piece of equipment. As the unwound wire does not require a large change in size, the use of the drawing machine during the second pass is a less than ideal use of resources.